The Honest Man’s Guide to Plagiarism

The crepuscular activity of plagiarism is roughly half as old as civilization. There is hardly a motif in primitive myth that does not approach universality, despite the modern supposition that distances and earthly obstacles made trade and theft impossible in the Old Stone Age.

One could make a tenable case that plagiarism as we know it began as an ecclesiastical crime. The early Fathers of the Church, rejected gospellers, in fact every cleric who could put pen to parchment ignored the Eighth Commandment. Even Christianity itself took its best myths from its rival proletarian religion, Mithraism. When sermons intruded into the Mass, the first great literary trade—sermon-stealing—arose immediately and has thriven for nearly two thousand years without congregations’ being aware that their priests’ eloquence was swotted out of source books.

JG

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John Greenway

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The crepuscular activity of plagiarism is roughly half as old as civilization. There is hardly a motif in primitive myth that does not approach universality, despite the modern supposition that distances and earthly obstacles made trade and theft impossible in the Old Stone Age.

One could make a tenable case that plagiarism as we know it began as an ecclesiastical crime. The early Fathers of the Church, rejected gospellers, in fact every cleric who could put pen to parchment ignored the Eighth Commandment. Even Christianity itself took its best myths from its rival proletarian religion, Mithraism. When sermons intruded into the Mass, the first great literary trade—sermon-stealing—arose immediately and has thriven for nearly two thousand years without congregations’ being aware that their priests’ eloquence was swotted out of source books.